Binkley - WINNER TAKES ALL (NEW EDITION): steve wynn, kirk kerkorian, gary loveman, and the race to own ... las vegas

L as Vegas has been a playground for men since the citys Mormon founding fathers arrived in 1905, leaving no mystery in why Steve Wynn made the city the center of his lifes work. Wynn understands how adults play, and how to cater to their pleasures better than most people on earth. He has catered to his own pleasures there alsopet dolphins, Impressionist masterpieces. While he isnt a child of Las Vegas and hasnt fully made his home there for years, the city is part of his soul, and vice versa: Steve Wynn is the soul of Las Vegas.

Even today, as he prepares to summer on the Aquarius, the yacht that is currently making its way from Monaco to Cap Ferrat, Wynn says he is starting a new business in Las Vegasan online art dealership. Housed in a stuccoed suburban shopping mall by McCarran International Airport, the listed office isnt the sort of place Steve Wynn would likely actually work. Its a placeholder for his new futureone he has assembled in the matter of months since his world imploded for the second time.

Its a rare thing for a human being to build an actual empire. Wynn did that twice, and in doing so he molded Las Vegaswhich is both a city and an industryinto what it is today, a world center of hedonism in sport, shopping, sex, theatrical entertainment, and gambling. His proclivity to chase his own passions has sometimes alarmed those around him, and this has been his Achilles heel.

Las Vegas has an uncanny way of attracting rule breakers, philistines, art collectors, owners of megayachts, political backerspeople who dont color within the lines. A Venn diagram of Las Vegas moguls and their friends extends in circles outward to Hollywood, Hong Kong, Jerusalem, Moscow, and Washington, D.C. The 2016 elections and their aftermath have been threaded with Las Vegas relationships: Sheldon Adelson, founder of the Las Vegas Sands empire, is one of the nations most generous Republican political donors. Wynn, until recently, was the finance chair of the national Republican Party. President Donald Trump is a wannabe Las Vegas mogul who never quite managed to do much there. An example of the way influence travels among this group: As U.S. president, Trump wished so urgently to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem that he was willing to wreck the United States relationships with many of its allies. Coincidentally, perhaps, Adelson wanted that Jerusalem embassy so badly that he offered to help pay for it himself.

Several characters in this book have transformed themselves in the past decade. Donald Trump, who failed to succeed in duplicating Las Vegas at his Atlantic City casinos, became president of the United States of America. Sheldon Adelson parlayed his investment in the Las Vegas Sands, where Frank and Dino once partied, into a casino dynasty with its weight in Asia, becoming one of the richest men in the world. Gary Loveman didnt succeed as hed hoped in the gambling business, but he is one of the few gambling chief executives to find an afterlife outside ita feat in itself. He has been working in the health care industry.

If this were a Hollywood film, it would be tempting to begin at the end, with the lens focused on a trim, blond seventy-six-year-old Elaine Wynn dressed in head-to-toe Oscar de la Renta, leaning in, fists planted on a vast table. The camera would pull back to reveal her surrounded by frowning men in suits, then thread a long hall into a casino with ringing slot machines, and then it would rise through the ceiling, high over the crazy quilt of themed Las Vegas Strip buildingsan Eiffel Tower, a Venetian palace, frothy dancing fountains. The scene would snap to azure Mediterranean waters and seagull callsthe lens closing in on a long yacht with a younger blond woman standing on an upper deck. Lounging on a chaise with brilliant yellow cushions would be a craggy seventy-six-year-old Steve Wynn, with disconcertingly raven-colored hair, talking urgently and loudly on his cell phone.